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CRISIS-MGMT

ERCIS C³M helps during flooding-experiment in The Hague

Volunteers are instructed on the experiment
Volunteers are instructed on the experiment

C³M presents two papers at the International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Disaster Management (ICT-DM’2016). These papers report on experiments held earlier this year during a simulated flooding event in The Hague. In this field experiment, we deployed the C³M-built tool GDACSmobile to interact with volunteers from outside of the crisis management domain.

The simulated flooding event is experiment 42 in a set of experiments within the EU Project DRIVER (Driving Innovation in Crisis Management for European Resilience). Interaction between crisis managers and the affected population was central within this experiment. A total of 5 software tools were tested for their ability to facilitate this interaction with citizens.

Our team from Münster deployed the GDACSmobile tool which enables people to report situations of interest to the crisis center. Nearly 20 groups of volunteers without experience with GDACSmobile were sent out to report the situations they encounter. Although the volunteers of the experiment stated that they had some difficulty with determining a proper category for their reports, they generally assigned appropriate categories. Some of the reports even showed the volunteers depicting the situations written on the markers. Overall, the volunteers participated eagerly while going through the affected areas in Wateringse Veld.

To simulate flooding and make sure the volunteers went through the area, we provided them with a task to look out for markers at given addresses. These markers provide them with information about what happened to this location so they can play their role as affected population in a flooding event. To get an overview on the amount and distribution of markers and which reports were obtained during the experiment, have a look at our Google layer. Based on our experiences and results during the experiment in The Hague, two publications will be presented on 13 December at ICT-DM'2016 in Vienna.

Publications presented at ICT-DM'2016

  • Middelhoff, M., Widera, A., van den Berg, R.P., Hellingrath, B., Auferbauer, D., Pielorz, J., & Havlik, D. (2016). Crowdsourcing and Crowdtasking in Crisis Management: Lessons Learned From a Field Experiment Simulating a Flooding in City of the Hague. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Disaster Management, Vienna. (Accepted)
  • van den Berg, R.P., Widera, A., Lechtenberg, S., Middelhoff, M., & Hellingrath, B. (2016). Pictograms and Assessment Categories as Crisis Communication Language: Lessons From a Field Exercise with GDACSmobile. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Information and Communicaiton Technologies for Disaster Management, Vienna, Austria. (Accepted)

Other publication based on the experiment